Another Man's War Read online

  Abuji had been made a laughing stock, and hatred festered inside him. He waited two years to take his revenge. In the confusion and noise of a jungle battle in Burma, he rushed towards Carpenter with a grenade, yanking the pin out with his teeth. Another Nigerian solider, Musa Pankshin, saw what was happening, and wrestled Abuji into a ditch. The grenade exploded, killing both Abuji and Musa. Of all his experiences during the war, this was the one Carpenter thought about the most in his old age. ‘I probably did overdo it, looking back over the years,’ he said with a shake of his head as if to convince himself that he’d done nothing wrong. ‘He was a dangerous man, that one, and he was destroying my men one by one. Something had to be done. No, I don’t regret it.’

  When Isaac was transferred from Abeokuta to Enugu, in eastern Nigeria, to an Infantry Training Centre, he had his own taste of how uncomfortable military life could really be. He was no longer spending his days with nurses, doctors and laboratory technicians in a hospital, or his Sundays scrambling over the Olumo Rock. Instead, he was drilled under a scorching sun, from dawn until dusk. Quick steps, slow steps, eyes right, eyes left, for hour after hour. And when he wasn’t being drilled, he was sent on gruelling exercises. The men were ordered to swing themselves along suspended rope ladders, sprint across fields with heavy packs on their backs, and crawl through oil drums, taking care to avoid the metal spikes and broken glass that had been strewn inside them.

  Isaac had little contact with British officers, but the African sergeants and corporals in his unit were ruthless. Their English did not seem to extend beyond a few words of abuse. One sergeant major at Enugu, known by the soldiers as Werewere – ‘Quick, quick’ in Yoruba – had an especially vindictive streak. The men said he was tougher than thunder. He could hurl abuse, or flog for mouf, with the worst of them, but he liked to use his fists as well. He was a hulking man, with blood-shot eyes, and he seemed to reserve a particular hatred for any recruit with a semblance of education. His favourite punishment was to make an errant soldier dig his own grave, barehanded, in a nearby cemetery. That way, Werewere used to laugh, the burial would be nice and easy, should the feeble recruit not survive the training course.*

  For Isaac, the drill and fitness training was a chastening experience but one that taught him valuable lessons. For the first time in his life, he had ventured outside the Yoruba lands of southwest Nigeria. He was mixing with Hausas from the North, Tivs from the Middle Belt, and Igbos from the East, picking up words from all their languages. He met Muslims, other kinds of Christians and followers of traditional beliefs. Isaac was beginning to understand the diversity and complexity of this territory the British had so hastily constructed. ‘Se o ri bi ti won ti gbin obi n’ile Hausa? Abi ti won tin sin maalu n’ile Yoruba?’ asked a Yoruba recruit whom Isaac met in Enugu. ‘Have you seen where they plant kola nut in the North? Or where they rear cattle in the South?’ His point was that each of the different peoples of Nigeria gratefully consumed what others could produce.

  The Hausa soldiers nicknamed Isaac Dogonyaro, or tall youth. His schooling attracted opprobrium, but it also brought advantages. For a modest fee, he could help his fellow soldiers by writing handsome letters home on their behalf. ‘Dear Wife’, the letters might begin, and they would often be signed off with a final flourish: ‘I hope this finds you swimming in the ocean of good health’.

  There was another benefit to those months in Enugu, one that Isaac would only appreciate with hindsight. He was being toughened up, in mind and body, being taught to obey orders, but also to endure hardship. He could not have imagined the ordeal that lay ahead, but one day he would surprise himself by looking back with something approaching gratitude towards the bullying sergeants whom he had once cursed so bitterly.

  After six months in Enugu, Isaac travelled by train to Lagos with hundreds of other recruits. They saw nothing of the city he had heard so much about, but were taken straight to the wharf at Apapa. They were ushered onto a troopship, and taken to their cramped compartments down below. Only now did Isaac learn where they were going: to Freetown, Sierra Leone, more than a thousand miles along the West African coast. But nobody told him what they would be doing in Sierra Leone, or how long he would be there. He was a tiny cog in the vast machine that was the British Army, a machine that rarely accounted for its workings to the hundreds of thousands of little moving pieces trapped inside it. If Isaac had been in any doubt about this beforehand, he now understood it plainly. Better, he philosophised, to accept the machine’s mysterious ways and allow it to take him where it decided to go. In fact, he was excited. As the ship pulled away from the wharf, the soldiers rushed back up to the deck and waved goodbye to the people on the quay below. Isaac looked down from that ship and felt a sudden thrill: he was leaving Nigeria for the first time.

  The journey up the coast lasted several days. Everything was new: the crashing of the waves against the hull, the dolphins and strange fish with wings that leapt out of the sea and flashed in the sunlight, the jellyfish swaying just beneath the surface, the tang of salt in the air, the cool breeze that made standing on the decks so refreshing. Between nine and ten o’clock in the morning, there was ‘boat parade’, when everyone assembled, wearing lifejackets, at a designated emergency position and awaited inspection by a senior officer. They did the drill again and again, until Isaac could do it with his eyes shut. ‘You put the jacket over your head like this,’ the officer said, miming the actions with his hands, ‘you tie one knot here, one knot here, you pull this cord here, and you jump. And then you pray.’

  One morning, they came into Freetown harbour, sailing past King Tom Point, and came to dock in the bay. Green mountains trailed away to the south in a series of great folds. It was time to disembark. They travelled on a railway up into the mountains, crossing ravines and passing waterfalls, before eventually arriving in a village tucked into one of the valleys. It was a place of flaming hibiscus and banana trees, bright-blue houses, Victorian lace curtains and old wooden churches. The village was called Regent.

  It was here that Isaac was finally assigned to his medical unit: the 29th Casualty Clearing Station. Most of its one hundred men were Sierra Leoneans, but he and several other Nigerians had been drafted in to bring it up to strength. The commanding officer, Major Moynagh, explained the purpose of a CCS. It was a sort of mobile military hospital, where the sick and wounded who came in from the front were assessed, given emergency treatment and then evacuated to a general hospital further back down the lines. The Major had twelve British officers working under him, all medical doctors, including some surgeons. Most of the Africans would work as nursing orderlies and operating theatre assistants.

  Major Moynagh was a mild and pious man. He organised prayers every morning, which Isaac dutifully attended. Several of the officers urged the Major to be strict with the Africans when they stepped out of line, but he always replied that justice should be tempered with mercy. Isaac and the other Africans joked that the Major was like a vicar without a vicarage, a man who would have been happier in the clergy than in an army.

  The 29th CCS was working in a military hospital in Regent, treating British and African soldiers who were sick or had been injured in jungle training exercises. On his days off, Isaac and his friends from the unit would travel down to Freetown. The familiar Yoruba names on the shop fronts – Ayodele, Abimbola, Taiwo – made them feel at home. But the Creoles that brushed past them on Freetown’s pavements appeared, if anything, even more refined and intimidating than the ones Isaac had admired in Abeokuta. They were called Krios here, ‘sabby boys’. Some had studied medicine and law in England and they spoke loudly in what Isaac imagined to be an Oxford accent. Their wives had fantastic names like Venus Bonaparte Smith and Kissy Black Jones.* Not everything was familiar.

  A few weeks later, Major Moynagh called the 29th CCS together, and told them that they would be travelling back down the coast to Nigeria. The night before they left, the men staged a concert in the Major’s honour. They h
ad composed a special song for him, ‘Major Moynagh wa o, omo olola, ope; Iba f’alaga oni o, iba o’ – ‘We thank our dear Major Moynagh of noble birth; We doff our hats for the chairman of today’s occasion.’

  The next day, the wives and families of many of the Sierra Leonean soldiers came to the barracks to say goodbye to their men. The women cried and wailed, and one beat the ground with her fists. The soldiers tried to reassure their families: they were only moving to another part of West Africa; they were not going to the war. Some, no doubt, believed what they were saying. But others, even as they did their best to comfort their loved ones, must have suspected that Nigeria would not be their final destination.

  The Royal West African Frontier Force was now a valuable asset to the British Army. Many of its units had been training for more than a year. At some point, surely, the politicians and generals in London would look at bringing it into the fray. Rumours, shared by officers and soldiers alike, swept through the ranks in those first weeks of 1943. The suspicion grew that they were not going to be sitting on the sidelines much longer. The focus of the war was changing.

  The German invasion of Britain that had seemed imminent in 1940 was now considered to be a remote possibility. From the summer of 1941, following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, the crucial battles in Europe were being fought on the Eastern Front. Initially, the Germans had made sweeping advances, but they could not crush the Soviets, and by late 1942 they were on the verge of surrender at the Battle of Stalingrad. The tide had also turned in North Africa, where, in November 1942, the British defeated the German army at El Alamein, raising the prospect of an Allied invasion of southern Europe. Britain’s African colonies, apparently so vulnerable at the start of the war, appeared much more secure. The Italians were defeated in Abyssinia and Somaliland. The Vichy threat to West Africa, the original impetus behind the expansion of forces in the British colonies there, had never materialised. And, after the Allied landings in Algeria and Morocco, the French West African territories had capitulated. Thousands of Africans had already served in the British Army as labour and pioneer units during the campaigns in North Africa and the Middle East, but, at the end of 1942, for the first time, it became possible for Britain’s generals to contemplate using African soldiers further afield. Their eyes turned to the one theatre of war where the outlook was still extremely bleak.

  The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded British Malaya in December 1941, just a few days before Isaac had enlisted. In the following weeks, they had swept down the Malayan peninsula towards Singapore. British strategy in the Far East was based on the assumption that Singapore, with its huge garrison and naval base, was an ‘impregnable fortress’ that guaranteed protection to the surrounding colonies and Australia to the south.

  However, the British had been far too complacent. Their propaganda portrayed Japanese soldiers as small, buck-toothed men, with slitty eyes and glasses – untrustworthy, but no match for their British counterparts. The British military attaché in Tokyo complained that ‘our chaps place the Japs somewhere between the Italians and the Afghans’,* and his warnings about Japanese military competence fell on deaf ears. When the Governor of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas, was told about the Japanese landings on the north-east coast of Malaya, he is alleged to have said, ‘Well, I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’

  The truth was that the Japanese infantry was highly trained, able to march long distances with heavy loads, surprisingly mobile in dense jungle and formidable in battle. Belatedly, the British were confronted with the folly of their prejudices, but they were in no position to respond. They had more troops, but their morale was low, their equipment poor and their leadership unimaginative. Furthermore, British aeroplanes were obsolete, and, with no control of the skies, British ships were hopelessly vulnerable. Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942. Some 100,000 British troops, most of whom were actually Indians and Australians, were taken prisoner. They would endure appalling conditions during their long captivity. It was the greatest defeat ever suffered by the British Empire. A Japanese soldier remembered the giddy sense of disbelief of the victorious army. ‘The Japanese did not expect that a stronger and richer country like Great Britain would be conquered so easily,’ he wrote. ‘The Japanese felt they were the Shining South. All the fears and worries at the outbreak of the war disappeared. Now Japan had the south in her hands…pretty soon Japan would be on top of the world.’* Suddenly, these ‘little men’ appeared to be invincible.

  The next prize for the Japanese, another British colony, lay to the north-west. Burma had oil, rubber, tin and rice – all resources the Japanese coveted. Northern Burma was also a vital supply route for the Chinese, longstanding enemies of the Japanese, who were receiving American weapons from British India. The Japanese wanted to cut this route, which they believed would tilt the war in China in Japan’s favour. They had bombed the Burmese capital, Rangoon, in December 1941, killing hundreds of people, many of whom had innocently stepped outside to watch what they thought was an air display. The Japanese advanced rapidly on the city, which the British abandoned in early March 1942.

  British generals had learnt some lessons from the debacle in Malaya, but their men were still no match for the Japanese in jungle fighting. The British Army fell back to the Indian frontier. Its units were largely intact but utterly demoralised. If the myth of white supremacy was the confidence trick that kept the Empire going, in South-East Asia it had been all but shattered in the space of just a few disastrous months. In this moment of crisis, the British had proved themselves incapable of defending those they ruled over. They had cut and run. Britain’s dependants, those who served the Empire as policemen, clerks and domestic servants, were abandoned and betrayed. The Japanese were poised, should they wish, to launch an invasion of India itself, the jewel of a badly dented imperial crown.

  In Delhi, General Archibald Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India, was acutely worried that he did not have enough soldiers to defend India, let alone recapture territory in Burma and Malaya. And so he cast his eyes over the Empire for a source of fighting men. On 9 December 1942, he wrote to the War Office in London, saying, ‘I have been considering use of African troops for operations in Burma or Eastwards. Advantage of West African troops is that they are used to jungle and to moving with Porter transport which would be invaluable in certain parts of Burma and Malaya.’* African troops, including West Africans, had fought well in Abyssinia, he said, and should be able to ‘compete’ with the Japanese.

  The suggestion went down well in London. A senior civil servant wrote that it would ‘be in accordance with the general Colonial Office policy of associating Colonial peoples actively in the war’.* The final decision to send both East and West African soldiers to India was taken at a Chiefs of Staff Committee meeting in London on 30 December. The generals concurred that there was now no realistic threat of invasion to Britain’s West African territories. They also noted the West Africans’ supposed familiarity with jungle conditions and immunity from malaria. And so approval was given. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, agreed ‘that these resources released from West Africa would be most useful’.*

  Isaac and his colleagues sailed back to Lagos at the beginning of 1943. From the capital, they travelled to a camp called Ede, near Osogbo. By this time, some of his officers had made their own deductions, based on the state of the war, that they would soon be going to Burma to fight the Japanese. A British attempt at a counterattack there, launched at the end of 1942 in the coastal region of Arakan, was running into difficulties.

  In January 1943, the War Office in London formally notified West African HQ that it would need two divisions to serve in Burma.* This amounted to some 56,000 soldiers from the West African colonies alone, perhaps more when supporting units were included. Time was not on Britain’s side. The African army needed to be trained quickly, if, as the War Office demanded, the first of these two divisions was to
embark for Burma by the middle of the year.

  A British brigadier called together the officers at Isaac’s camp. ‘I cannot tell you where you are going to go, gentlemen,’ he said, trying to strike an upbeat note, ‘but I can tell you this. You are very lucky people. You are going to fight the Japanese.’

  Some of the officers were privately dismayed by the brigadier’s words. A largely untested West African force was being sent to fight the hitherto invincible Japanese. It was a daunting prospect. Trevor Clark, a young lieutenant, who was fresh out of Oxford and had been in Africa only a few weeks, felt that he knew little about his men or his fellow officers, and that their training had been basic at best. He worried that they would be ‘the virtually naked led by the largely clueless’, and no match for the Japanese.*

  The generals’ theory, expounded in Delhi and London, that Africans were ‘used to jungle’ and would therefore be good jungle fighters was based on equal measures of ignorance and optimism. Trevor Clark ruefully remarked that he might as well have been defined as a street fighter because he ‘had been brought up in cities’. In fact, the majority of African recruits, not least from Nigeria, which would provide the greatest number of troops, came from dry savannah and semi-desert areas. But John Hamilton, who ended up fighting alongside Clark in Burma with the Gambian battalion, did believe that West Africans ‘jungle-reared or not…had senses more acute than those of Europeans, sharper hearing, quicker eyes and more far-sighted’.*